Camp 0602: Seven Locks, Wilts & Berks Canal: One down, one (nearly) ready to go You will, no doubt, be familiar with the Seven Locks project on the Wilts & Berks by now: it s part of the Dig Deep initiative this year, London, KESCRG and BITM have held digs there, and last year s October Canal Camp took place on the same site. It s a Good Thing: you can come back and see what progress has taken place - and progress itself is unusually dramatic by canal restoration standards, because work has been concentrated on Locks 2, 3 and 4. So for an extended period of ten days (taking in the Easter Bank Holiday weekend) The Other Easter Camp took place, with the express intention of laying waste to Lock 4, among other things. The leaders were to be Jo Smudge Smith and (fiancé!) Dave Taz Tarrant but Dave had recently scored himself a promotion and with it came a different work rota, so Yours Truly deputised where necessary. This mainly meant driving van RFB around and filling things up with the usual variety of fuels: dumpers take diesel, the brick saw takes 2-stroke, the genny takes petrol and the volunteers take tea, sarnies and cake. The cook was Harri T and the cakemaker in chief was Di. Lock 4 has been declared unstable and is to be rebuilt in new brick. The old bricks coming out have been piled up and are gradually being cleaned off and stacked onto pallets, as the local landowner has an idea that they might just sell on the architectural reclamation market. An army of navvies (some of which were already veterans of the chamber s clearance on Smudge-n-Taz s camp last October) reduced the walls down to waterline level (where a scaffolding deck had been installed) and passed the bricks up to another army of brick cleaners and sorters. This was repeated on a daily basis until It Was An ExLock. Meanwhile, at Lock 3, huge quantities of concrete backfill were poured into the trench between the permanent blockwork shuttering and the brick lock walls and the finishing touches were put to the brick coping at the tail end. Di also managed the stonework and clay-puddling job which saw the bankside married up to the wing wall on the towpath side.
Camp reports ...and the Other Easter Camp at SevenLocksontheWilts & Berks
The concreting was, to put it mildly, a backbreaking task as the lack of a small excavator meant that the aggregate had to be hand-loaded up into a dumper. After mixing, the concrete was dropped into a barrow and as a two-man lift brought the barrow up onto the retaining wall another person barrowed the mix into the trench. This happened barrow-by-barrow for about three days. Lock 2 s clearance continued, on the top end of it (the rest is under the road and the tail is still buried) with several enormous stumps coming out and bringing quite a few bits of wall with them. For reluctant stumps, we were fortunate to have Jonathan Todd on our camp. Now really, Jonathan should be cloned, drilled and added to each Kit, as when heavy, repetitive work needs doing, he will dispatch it with unbelievable ease and come straight back for more. There was one occasion, however, when even Jonathan went to fetch a machine, thus achieving stump removal and partial demolition of Lock 2 in one go.
Lock 2 at Seven Locks: Tirforing stumps out
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